ARTIST STATEMENT: I love stories, and I love storytellers. My portraits of my fellow New Yorkers contain mementos of the fascinating personal narratives they carry with them. Often living their lives with the memory of brutality and exile, they form an ever-changing milieu of the ambitious and the displaced. The sheer density of such overlapping stories is my inspiration. In the work of my favorite painters I have found the means to portray the energy of New York’s immigrant community. I retool the flat areas of delicate color in the Baroque Tiepolo, the iconic power of Leger’s bold figures, and the layering of pictorial space in early Stuart Davis. Beyond the quotidian visual details that ground modern urban existence, I try to capture its rhythms: of traffic, cash registers, baby talk, radios. Change is incessant; both community and individual are in constant transition, so each painting records an evanescent moment. I fuse narrative and portraiture because I want to preserve something of the stories behind the faces, and the history behind the crowd.